Bill Clinton: “Sure. I don't blame anybody for thinking that, because while Americans know more about their own health care than almost…”

“Sure. I don't blame anybody for thinking that, because while Americans know more about their own health care than almost any other subject, most of us have never had a chance to learn anything about how the system as a whole works. So it's against our common experience to believe that you can get more and pay the same or less, or that if you control costs, you won't have to give up something really valuable for it. That's against our common experience. But if you study the system, you'll find that we have, literally--I'll say again-- just in paperwork alone, a dime on the dollar more waste in our system than any other system in the world, that we have more variations in prices with no differences in outcomes than any other system in the world, that there are all kinds of waste in this system that can be managed down. You don't have to take my word for it. I saw what those folks said, but let me just give you one example. The Mayo Clinic, we would all agree that they have pretty good health care, wouldn't we? I mean, their inflation is 3.9 percent this year; that's less than half the medical rate of inflation in the country. And I could give you lots of other examples of plans with very high consumer satisfaction where people are very happy with what they have and where they have squeezed out massive amounts of waste with no loss of quality. And so, that's what this debate ought to be about. I want that debate. Remember what I said last night? The first thing is security, simplicity, savings, choice, quality, and responsibility. If we give up quality, the rest of this stuff won't happen, because you can't have security without quality. So we'll debate it, but I'm telling you, the more you study this, the more you become convinced that we can achieve these savings. Mr. Koppel. President Clinton, we've got a public policy expert, John White, sitting up at the Kennedy School in Harvard. Am I misstating it, Mr. White, when I say that you don't think the figures add up? [John White asked why the plan did not phase in benefits more slowly.]”